[Sigia-l] The new face of web info

[Joe 10 Enterprises]

At 12:52 AM -0400 4/11/02, Ziya Oz wrote:
>
>This, of course, does/should not take away anything from the huge promise of
>delivering componentized data over the Internet. I'm still interested in
>folks' views on if this new mode is good or bad for IAs. :-)
>

It'll be good. It'll be real good. At least in the near to mid terms.

Unstructured data isn't really information... it's just art, or 
entertainment, and most what passes for art and entertainment isn't 
worth checking out.

Structured data is grand, but if the structure is domain specific, 
it's not information or art or entertainment, it's science, or tech 
garble, or something else.

"Stuff" on the Web will certainly continue, but web pages can't 
really pay big until at least the content of the data is machine 
readable. Structured data with a master plan and an agreed upon 
system of self discovery and serialization will pave the way, and 
who's going to come up with a decent master plan besides 
info-org-junkies, aka, IAs. Please, let's not leave it to the 
engineers! :)

These things will take off and they will get smarter. Tim B-L is 
tight in there with the Semantic Web initiative, and that's pretty 
much good enough for me. Get thy head around RDF, though it may 
change or go away completely; it's based on "Ontologies" which are 
little more than a spin on taxonomies.

I've been preaching this stuff for almost 5 years since working on 
'Magical A-Life Avatars' with Peter Small:
http://www.avatarnets.com/sitejuly2001/magAlifeAvs.html
http://www.avatarnets.com/
though there are more up to date and fully functional treatments of 
the same or similar concept all around.

/Joe

-- 
Joe Tennis
Information Design Honcho
Joe 10 Enterprises
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joe at joe10.com
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